My last city charged a 3% convienance fee if you paid with credit cards for your water bill. If you paid online, it was a flat out $5 fee (which was about 8%-10%). I argued, because in Texas, you are not supposed to charge cash and credit card customers differnt prices, but what am I going to do? It's not like I could change my water provider, and I don't have the money (nor is it worth it) to take them to court over it.
I have seen some places (like gas stations) give customers discounts if you pay with cash. I understand that these card companies charge places a small fee to accept cards, but I wonder if it is really that much higher than the cost of paying Brinks to come out and collect and deliver money in their armed trucks, the risks of getting robbed, the costs of having to take cash to the bank, having to wait for checks to clear.
I am going to say that the size of the market for e-ink displays that size is extreamly limited. Even eReaders are going over to tablets, as more and more people just want more from a portable device (I on the other hand went from a tablet to an e-ink reader because I wanted shorter bootup times and longer battery life as I read ALL THE TIME).
At work, we have a wall of screens that also just display metrics and data. We don't evne use it for our own use - from my desk, I cannot read those screens. They are to look pretty when investors and VPs come in. AFAIK, e-ink is only available in B&W anyways. So, we have a wall full of $800 off-the-shelf LCDs that display our data. The whole wall probably cost $6,000, and I could probably build the whole thing now for half the costs.
LCDs, while they do pull more electricity than e-readers, still don't pull THAT much. As such, the cost ratio of having this wall of screens that only updates once every few minutes is really not that high.
Now, how many places are actually going to want a 30 inch B&W screen that has a slow refresh rate? While there may be a market for this, I doubt that they would be able to produce these and return a profit and be able to sell these for the same price, or less, than LCDs.
I also doubt that your metrics displays are really even there for your use. At all the companies I have worked at, no worker ever looked over to stare at the data on the wall. It is there to wow investors and VPs. As such, you want the shiniest thing you can get. LCD panels are the way to go.
Someone has probably already said this (if so, sorry for the duplicate post)
But...
Time to start hiring C programmers out of college to get to work on that y2k38 bug before planes start falling out of the sky and missles start launching on their own.
Granted, there are places you can go in Disney and eat without reservations. But, especially with Epcot, one of the best things there IS the food. You might be able to get into China, Britain or Germany without a reservation, but The Seas and Noraway sometimes are booked solid for months.
A friend and I went to Disney a couple of years back, simply because we were looking for something to do, and Orlando was a cheap destination. All of my friends sent me money to pick up stuff for their kids. I picked up tons of Princess / Fairy stuff, had them shipped to the front gate with my name and other information on it (I think you can even have it sent to your room if you are in a Disney resort). Many people do this, pick up stuff for their friends. Once again, non-issue.
Premiere and Encore were not added to the CS Suite until CS3. Dreamweaver and Acrobat were not added to CS until 2.3. No After Effects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_CS#History No 64 bit support or GPU support. So they are pretty much giving away 7 year old versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign? Sounds good to me - create some brand loyalty for your products. I say Adobe's PR department should just let this one slide.
Except, during cold and flu season, most people do have a cough or sneeze anyways, due to allergies or colds or whatnot. So just because you are not sneezing or coughing as a result of the flu because you built up the immunity, most people are still coughing and sneezing, and can be carrying and hence, spreading the virus.
The flu vacine is to help keep you from getting sick, not from passing it on to others. You are still a carrier, and a transmitter.
I don't see an issue with this. You already have a room key tied to your credit card number, a pass with your name on it, and you have to book reservations at most of the eating places in Orlando. Disney already has my information for all of that stuff, and pretty much can already track me. Why not have an all-in-one system? Or is it just because its RFID wristband that everyone here is having an issue with?
Yes, but that is not what the blurb is stating - they are arguring about patient safty. A Flu vaccine helps you build up an immunity to the virus - in other words, if you are exposed to it, you are less likely to get sick, and if you do, the symptoms are not as bad. Getting a flu vaccine does NOT mean that you will not carry the virus. As such, firing on the grounds that they fired these workers on is not based on science, and as such, there is no grounds for termination. Whether the workers refused the vaccine based on religious grounds or not is moot.
Now, if they said the workers were fired becasue the shots were mandnitory to cut down on worker sick time, that would be different, at which point it becomes a question of if an employer has the right to pass mandates that violates workers religious beliefs. However, as these workers are already in the medical field, it's hard for me to believe that they can seriously claim refusing vacinations based on religious beliefs.
Completely agree - I find Al Jazeera English to be one of the most reliable news sources, certainly better than Fox News or MSNBC or CNN (Ironically, CNN International is actually pretty good).I got Al Jazeera English loaded up on my Roku and have the app on my Android phone.
I did have some trouble understanding the blurb - maybe I should have RTFA, but if Americans have issues accepting Al Jazeera English, what makes them think that launching an Al Jazeera America will do any good? Oh, the people have funny accents? I don't see Americans having any issues with BBC.
I honestly do not see the point in starting an American-aimed network. Just try to push Al Jazeera English some more. It's a great news network.
I missed the original news story, but wow! The Trinity River is dirty enough without adding pollutants to it. The Trinity River feeds lakes throughout the state that many communities use as drinking water. I hope this company and the owners get the high end of the fines and prision time.
Does this mean that the Windows Media format is finally going to die? I haven't used Encoder in years, and last time I went to go download it, it seemed like it was part of Expressions, so I gave up on the format.
This is a crime? He had weapons in his house, and this is something worthy of charging him with something? You better arrest every gun owner and pawn shop owner and knife owner (that is just about everyone - how many of us have a buitcher knife in the kitchen) or every single lead pipe owner or every single wrench owner in the US! All of those items could be potentially dangerous, and could be used as a weapon! Let's charge everyone in the US with posession of a weapon!
What s stupid charge! If you want to charge him with something, at least charge him with something that has a chance of standing up. The case should be thrown out for the absurdity of the charge.
While I may not know the whole story, I find it concerning that "posession of a weapon" is a reasonable charge.
I am going to get marked "troll" for this, I know, but Python is really worthless unless you are working in an IT house. The language is not that popular outside of the open-source community. The language has too many drawbacks - its SLOW (as it is not compiled), and any major revision to the language requires you to either rewrite your code or have 3 or 4 different versions of Python on your machine. Don't get me wrong, Python does have some uses, but unless your company specifically asks you to learn it, I wouldn't bother. It's probably going to do nothing for you on your resume.
Probably the 4 best things you can learn are Pearl, PHP, SQL (not really a programming language, I know), and.Net (oh, here come more troll comments). Those look really good on resumes, and seem to be the things that the majority of businesses are using.
If you plan to go into a software house, also learn C and Java.
HTML5 and CSS may also be good things to brush up on if you want to do web / app stuff.
Seriously, if you plan to stay in the US, your obvious answers are Spanish (for dealing with Latin American customers) or French (Canadians, Ay). If you learn one of those two, Portuguise should be easy to pick up if you want to deal with Brazilians. If you plan to do software developing for international customers (ie, outside of the western hemisphere), the obvious choices are Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and German, probably in that order.
To say one language for a second language is better than another is kinda moot (unless your first language is anything other than English. Not that I am biased, but most of the world does use English as the language they conduct business in). It all depends where you want to go.
I will give you a tip - I have found that if you learn any of the Latin-based languages, the others are significantly easier to pick up. As they have similar roots, many words are similar between the languages, and they all have almost the same rules for gender, congregations, etc.
Russian is Germanic based, as is English. Once I figured that out, I actually found out that Russian wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it was. Not that I am fluent in either, but don't be too scared of them.
As far as ease of learning languages, your Latin-based languages are probably going to be the easiest (especially Spanish, as you probably already have exposure to it, and this day and age in the US, knowing a bit of Spanish is VERY useful).
Second in difficulty is probably going to be German - not that German is a difficult language, but you probably have less exposure to it than Spanish and French. But German is just, well, COOL and geeky. Check around with a lot of your fellow geeks - I am willing to bet that many know at least a few phrases of German.
Russian is probably the third most difficult, mainly because you have to learn a new alphabet. The actual language won't be as hard as you think, and will be significantly easier if you know German and can look for roots.
Your eastern languages, while probably very useful, are going to be the hardest, and most frustrating. I don't know if I would take one of them as a second language - maybe as a third or fourth. If you start off with Chinese or Japanese, you are going to get frustrated, and may not want to learn a second language ever again. I say to start with something easier, then go to one of these after you master a third or fourth language. Also, while over a billion people speak Chinese (Cantonese or Mandrain), unless you have direct business relations with China, you will probably never use it.
Now, if you are a religion nut, Hebrew, and Greek are a plus.
So, don't ask yourself what is the best 2nd language to learn (unless you don't speak English). Ask yourself what you want to do with it.
The alien overloards, who kickstarted human intelligence and helped to build the pyramids, are returning on December 21st, as promised, to become our masters once again. As we will refuse to bow down and try to launch nukes at them, they will simply destroy us rather than let these pesky Earthlings talk back to them. As they are currently traveling here faster than the speed of light, NASA can't see them.
Yeah, FoxNews has talked about it a bit today as well, but I could find nothing on their website about it. But my experience has been what is on the Fox News website rarely reflects what they cover on the news network. If it wasn't for the fact that I had to have Fox News on all day at work, I would never watch it. Actually, I wouldn't watch any of the American press - there doesn't seem to be an American News Network that reports unbiassed news. CNN Headline news probably comes the closest
I actually think this is probably why I didn't mind The Hobbit in HFR. I turned the feature on on my television one day, and forgot about it. HFR in The Hobbit seemed natual to me, and a perfect fit for 3D. It was the 24fps trailers that showed before hand that felt jarring and unnatual to me. I just don't go to the theater much any more, as I get a better experience at home a lot of times. But this HFR thing was great, and I for one hope to see more.
Like I said, maybe its just the fact that I got used to watching movies with the TrueMotion turned on.
I think I have 2.0.3, mainly because I haven't been on my home PC much lately - I moved about a month ago and still working on getting stuff going. My home PC hasn't been a priority. Pretty sure i have upgraded to 2.0.4 on the laptop.
Someone else mentioned how to setup the prefrences to default to 5.1. Going to try that tonight.
Yeah, I know you can manually crop videos. The issue is when you have like, oh, say a couple of dozen clips that you put in a playlist, and are like outputting to the television. You then have to turn cropping on and off - ie - some videos are already 16x9 (so cropping doesn't apply), some are 4x3, and some are 4x3 letterbox. I usually just end up reencoding the videos, but any time you reencode a video, you loose quality. of course, if its 4x3 letterbox, the video is probably older and usually has some other issues, so I normally end up running a few filters to clean up the video as well. Anyways, I'm chasing rabbits. It just that it would be nice if there was an option to detect black bars, like many encoding packages has, and crop the video.
Never thought to right click on a folder and tell it to play in VLC, that may work. Will try that tonight. Makes sense, I use it a lot on individual video files, just never thought to try it on a folder. The Open Folder thing has had issues for me in the past. I don't think I have tried it since 2.0.1, and was trying that on a Blu-Ray structure. Will try that this weekend and see if I can get it working.
The 100mbit is really stupid for most end users to have. The issue isn't with charter, but with who you are connecting to. You are not going to get 100mbit downloads from anywhere. The 100mbit line is really for people who have like 5 kids, and everyone is trying to stream HD Vudu or download torrents or play games at the same time.
I had 30, and it was overkill for me. I finally reduced it down to 15mbit, and I was more than happy - I was still able to view Netflix or Vudu HDX while I was downloading on two PCs simultaniously without a hit in speed.
People just don't really seem to understand - faster connections on your end doesn't mean you have that connection to every single server in the world.
Also, Charter doesn't block any ports that I know of. Open up a DMZ on your router.
Now, I just moved, and went from Charter to Time Warner in the new area. Now, you might think "OMG, Time Warner is number 7, they must be horrible" but notice that if you actually look at the speeds on the chart in the article, Fios, which is number 2, is 2.19Mbps, Time Warner is 2.12. That really is not that big of a difference. Even Uverse, at 1.94, that is only a 200k difference, which is roughly a 10% difference.
Now, you start getting below UVerse, and the speeds get horrible. However, I think CentruyLink and Windstream tend to be providers for apartment complexes and such, so you are probably on a shared connection. With the DSL speeds, that is probably average, and I am willing to bet that many of those people have the $15-$20 a month 768kbps package.
This chart is pretty much useless. It doesn't show the potential that an end user can get, it just shows what the average speed of a Netflix stream on that connection is. I am willing to bet that many people have the slowest broadband speeds their ISP offers. 6Mbps DSL is plenty fast enough for a Netflix HD stream. Before I got Charter, I streamed over 6Mbps DSL. Worked perfectly.
I don't see many of the issues you are complaining about. I am not saying they don't exist, I've just never seen them. I have seen a couple of obscure codecs that VLC doesn't work, but they play just fine in Media Player with KLite installed. I've never seen the point of network streaming with VLC - I either share the folder or use Windows Media Center to share the folders, and pull up the files on my laptop or XBox. Seems to be much less trouble. Menu support for DVDs does suck, but I normally have VLC set to skip menus anyways.
Things I would like to see: 1) What is up with VLC wanting to rebuild the font cache? I haven't installed new fonts. Stop asking to rebuild the font cache every 10 or 20th start. 2) If the codec isn't bundled in with VLC, it should be able to read the codec off of Windows. This will stop me from having to resort to Media Player for the couple of obscure videos that VLC doesn't support (or having to convert the video) 3) I want to be able to setup some defaults on videos. If the audio stream has 5.1 channels, I want it to default to that, not to 2.0 channels. I understand that most people do not have 5.1 hooked up to their PCs, but I would like the option to have that set as a default. 4) Be able to setup defaults for certain types of videos based on resolution, framerate, aspect ratio, etc. For example, there are several software packages out there (mainly converters) that have the option to detect black bars (ie 4x3 letterboxed stuff). I would love an option to detect that in a video and auto-crop to 16x9. If the framerate is say 30 or 60fps, I would like to have an option to deinterlace by default. 5) Better support for 3D material. Mainly my issue is that I have 3D software that renders all files as full-SBS. I have looked and looked for options in the software to render HalfSBS, but I just can't find the option. The problem in VLC is that it scales the video on my 3DTV, to 1920x1080, meaning that my videos get pillarboxed and stretched when I switch the TV to SBS mode. i don't have this issue with HalfSBS material that I rip from Youtube and such. Basically, I want the option where, if the video is 3840x1080, it would scale it to 1920x1080. Right now, the only option I seem to have is to use Total Media Center and have it send a native 3D image to the TV instead of SBS. This works, but ITMC seems to be really bad about dropping frames, even on an 8 core system and high end video card. 6) Support for DVD and Blu-Ray disc structures. Like, I think they took this feature out of PowerDVD, but you used to be able to tell it to play disc structures on the harddrive. I author a lot of the materail I shoot to Blu-Ray, and would like to make sure it works before I write it to disc. Right now, I have to spend about an hour writing it to a BD-RW to see that it works right.
if any of these features are already in VLC, someone please tell me how to use them!
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My last city charged a 3% convienance fee if you paid with credit cards for your water bill. If you paid online, it was a flat out $5 fee (which was about 8%-10%). I argued, because in Texas, you are not supposed to charge cash and credit card customers differnt prices, but what am I going to do? It's not like I could change my water provider, and I don't have the money (nor is it worth it) to take them to court over it.
I have seen some places (like gas stations) give customers discounts if you pay with cash. I understand that these card companies charge places a small fee to accept cards, but I wonder if it is really that much higher than the cost of paying Brinks to come out and collect and deliver money in their armed trucks, the risks of getting robbed, the costs of having to take cash to the bank, having to wait for checks to clear.
I am going to say that the size of the market for e-ink displays that size is extreamly limited. Even eReaders are going over to tablets, as more and more people just want more from a portable device (I on the other hand went from a tablet to an e-ink reader because I wanted shorter bootup times and longer battery life as I read ALL THE TIME).
At work, we have a wall of screens that also just display metrics and data. We don't evne use it for our own use - from my desk, I cannot read those screens. They are to look pretty when investors and VPs come in. AFAIK, e-ink is only available in B&W anyways. So, we have a wall full of $800 off-the-shelf LCDs that display our data. The whole wall probably cost $6,000, and I could probably build the whole thing now for half the costs.
LCDs, while they do pull more electricity than e-readers, still don't pull THAT much. As such, the cost ratio of having this wall of screens that only updates once every few minutes is really not that high.
Now, how many places are actually going to want a 30 inch B&W screen that has a slow refresh rate? While there may be a market for this, I doubt that they would be able to produce these and return a profit and be able to sell these for the same price, or less, than LCDs.
I also doubt that your metrics displays are really even there for your use. At all the companies I have worked at, no worker ever looked over to stare at the data on the wall. It is there to wow investors and VPs. As such, you want the shiniest thing you can get. LCD panels are the way to go.
Someone has probably already said this (if so, sorry for the duplicate post)
But...
Time to start hiring C programmers out of college to get to work on that y2k38 bug before planes start falling out of the sky and missles start launching on their own.
Granted, there are places you can go in Disney and eat without reservations. But, especially with Epcot, one of the best things there IS the food. You might be able to get into China, Britain or Germany without a reservation, but The Seas and Noraway sometimes are booked solid for months.
A friend and I went to Disney a couple of years back, simply because we were looking for something to do, and Orlando was a cheap destination. All of my friends sent me money to pick up stuff for their kids. I picked up tons of Princess / Fairy stuff, had them shipped to the front gate with my name and other information on it (I think you can even have it sent to your room if you are in a Disney resort). Many people do this, pick up stuff for their friends. Once again, non-issue.
Oh wow! Now, you don't have AVCHD support, 64 bit support, or GPU acceleration, but I might be able to live with that!
*That is the Orlando Disney parks and resorts, not the city of Orlando. :-)
Premiere and Encore were not added to the CS Suite until CS3. Dreamweaver and Acrobat were not added to CS until 2.3. No After Effects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_CS#History No 64 bit support or GPU support. So they are pretty much giving away 7 year old versions of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign? Sounds good to me - create some brand loyalty for your products. I say Adobe's PR department should just let this one slide.
Simply download the PC version and run it in Parallels.
Except, during cold and flu season, most people do have a cough or sneeze anyways, due to allergies or colds or whatnot. So just because you are not sneezing or coughing as a result of the flu because you built up the immunity, most people are still coughing and sneezing, and can be carrying and hence, spreading the virus.
The flu vacine is to help keep you from getting sick, not from passing it on to others. You are still a carrier, and a transmitter.
I don't see an issue with this. You already have a room key tied to your credit card number, a pass with your name on it, and you have to book reservations at most of the eating places in Orlando. Disney already has my information for all of that stuff, and pretty much can already track me. Why not have an all-in-one system? Or is it just because its RFID wristband that everyone here is having an issue with?
Yes, but that is not what the blurb is stating - they are arguring about patient safty. A Flu vaccine helps you build up an immunity to the virus - in other words, if you are exposed to it, you are less likely to get sick, and if you do, the symptoms are not as bad. Getting a flu vaccine does NOT mean that you will not carry the virus. As such, firing on the grounds that they fired these workers on is not based on science, and as such, there is no grounds for termination. Whether the workers refused the vaccine based on religious grounds or not is moot.
Now, if they said the workers were fired becasue the shots were mandnitory to cut down on worker sick time, that would be different, at which point it becomes a question of if an employer has the right to pass mandates that violates workers religious beliefs. However, as these workers are already in the medical field, it's hard for me to believe that they can seriously claim refusing vacinations based on religious beliefs.
Completely agree - I find Al Jazeera English to be one of the most reliable news sources, certainly better than Fox News or MSNBC or CNN (Ironically, CNN International is actually pretty good).I got Al Jazeera English loaded up on my Roku and have the app on my Android phone.
I did have some trouble understanding the blurb - maybe I should have RTFA, but if Americans have issues accepting Al Jazeera English, what makes them think that launching an Al Jazeera America will do any good? Oh, the people have funny accents? I don't see Americans having any issues with BBC.
I honestly do not see the point in starting an American-aimed network. Just try to push Al Jazeera English some more. It's a great news network.
I missed the original news story, but wow! The Trinity River is dirty enough without adding pollutants to it. The Trinity River feeds lakes throughout the state that many communities use as drinking water. I hope this company and the owners get the high end of the fines and prision time.
Does this mean that the Windows Media format is finally going to die? I haven't used Encoder in years, and last time I went to go download it, it seemed like it was part of Expressions, so I gave up on the format.
This is a crime? He had weapons in his house, and this is something worthy of charging him with something? You better arrest every gun owner and pawn shop owner and knife owner (that is just about everyone - how many of us have a buitcher knife in the kitchen) or every single lead pipe owner or every single wrench owner in the US! All of those items could be potentially dangerous, and could be used as a weapon! Let's charge everyone in the US with posession of a weapon!
What s stupid charge! If you want to charge him with something, at least charge him with something that has a chance of standing up. The case should be thrown out for the absurdity of the charge.
While I may not know the whole story, I find it concerning that "posession of a weapon" is a reasonable charge.
I am going to get marked "troll" for this, I know, but Python is really worthless unless you are working in an IT house. The language is not that popular outside of the open-source community. The language has too many drawbacks - its SLOW (as it is not compiled), and any major revision to the language requires you to either rewrite your code or have 3 or 4 different versions of Python on your machine. Don't get me wrong, Python does have some uses, but unless your company specifically asks you to learn it, I wouldn't bother. It's probably going to do nothing for you on your resume.
Probably the 4 best things you can learn are Pearl, PHP, SQL (not really a programming language, I know), and .Net (oh, here come more troll comments). Those look really good on resumes, and seem to be the things that the majority of businesses are using.
If you plan to go into a software house, also learn C and Java.
HTML5 and CSS may also be good things to brush up on if you want to do web / app stuff.
Seriously, if you plan to stay in the US, your obvious answers are Spanish (for dealing with Latin American customers) or French (Canadians, Ay). If you learn one of those two, Portuguise should be easy to pick up if you want to deal with Brazilians. If you plan to do software developing for international customers (ie, outside of the western hemisphere), the obvious choices are Chinese, Russian, Japanese, and German, probably in that order.
To say one language for a second language is better than another is kinda moot (unless your first language is anything other than English. Not that I am biased, but most of the world does use English as the language they conduct business in). It all depends where you want to go.
I will give you a tip - I have found that if you learn any of the Latin-based languages, the others are significantly easier to pick up. As they have similar roots, many words are similar between the languages, and they all have almost the same rules for gender, congregations, etc.
Russian is Germanic based, as is English. Once I figured that out, I actually found out that Russian wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it was. Not that I am fluent in either, but don't be too scared of them.
As far as ease of learning languages, your Latin-based languages are probably going to be the easiest (especially Spanish, as you probably already have exposure to it, and this day and age in the US, knowing a bit of Spanish is VERY useful).
Second in difficulty is probably going to be German - not that German is a difficult language, but you probably have less exposure to it than Spanish and French. But German is just, well, COOL and geeky. Check around with a lot of your fellow geeks - I am willing to bet that many know at least a few phrases of German.
Russian is probably the third most difficult, mainly because you have to learn a new alphabet. The actual language won't be as hard as you think, and will be significantly easier if you know German and can look for roots.
Your eastern languages, while probably very useful, are going to be the hardest, and most frustrating. I don't know if I would take one of them as a second language - maybe as a third or fourth. If you start off with Chinese or Japanese, you are going to get frustrated, and may not want to learn a second language ever again. I say to start with something easier, then go to one of these after you master a third or fourth language. Also, while over a billion people speak Chinese (Cantonese or Mandrain), unless you have direct business relations with China, you will probably never use it.
Now, if you are a religion nut, Hebrew, and Greek are a plus.
So, don't ask yourself what is the best 2nd language to learn (unless you don't speak English). Ask yourself what you want to do with it.
I do have a bluetooth keyboard, so that may be an option. I'll try that!
The alien overloards, who kickstarted human intelligence and helped to build the pyramids, are returning on December 21st, as promised, to become our masters once again. As we will refuse to bow down and try to launch nukes at them, they will simply destroy us rather than let these pesky Earthlings talk back to them. As they are currently traveling here faster than the speed of light, NASA can't see them.
Yeah, FoxNews has talked about it a bit today as well, but I could find nothing on their website about it. But my experience has been what is on the Fox News website rarely reflects what they cover on the news network. If it wasn't for the fact that I had to have Fox News on all day at work, I would never watch it. Actually, I wouldn't watch any of the American press - there doesn't seem to be an American News Network that reports unbiassed news. CNN Headline news probably comes the closest
I actually think this is probably why I didn't mind The Hobbit in HFR. I turned the feature on on my television one day, and forgot about it. HFR in The Hobbit seemed natual to me, and a perfect fit for 3D. It was the 24fps trailers that showed before hand that felt jarring and unnatual to me. I just don't go to the theater much any more, as I get a better experience at home a lot of times. But this HFR thing was great, and I for one hope to see more.
Like I said, maybe its just the fact that I got used to watching movies with the TrueMotion turned on.
I think I have 2.0.3, mainly because I haven't been on my home PC much lately - I moved about a month ago and still working on getting stuff going. My home PC hasn't been a priority. Pretty sure i have upgraded to 2.0.4 on the laptop.
Someone else mentioned how to setup the prefrences to default to 5.1. Going to try that tonight.
Yeah, I know you can manually crop videos. The issue is when you have like, oh, say a couple of dozen clips that you put in a playlist, and are like outputting to the television. You then have to turn cropping on and off - ie - some videos are already 16x9 (so cropping doesn't apply), some are 4x3, and some are 4x3 letterbox. I usually just end up reencoding the videos, but any time you reencode a video, you loose quality. of course, if its 4x3 letterbox, the video is probably older and usually has some other issues, so I normally end up running a few filters to clean up the video as well. Anyways, I'm chasing rabbits. It just that it would be nice if there was an option to detect black bars, like many encoding packages has, and crop the video.
Never thought to right click on a folder and tell it to play in VLC, that may work. Will try that tonight. Makes sense, I use it a lot on individual video files, just never thought to try it on a folder. The Open Folder thing has had issues for me in the past. I don't think I have tried it since 2.0.1, and was trying that on a Blu-Ray structure. Will try that this weekend and see if I can get it working.
I've had Charter for years. Never had issues.
The 100mbit is really stupid for most end users to have. The issue isn't with charter, but with who you are connecting to. You are not going to get 100mbit downloads from anywhere. The 100mbit line is really for people who have like 5 kids, and everyone is trying to stream HD Vudu or download torrents or play games at the same time.
I had 30, and it was overkill for me. I finally reduced it down to 15mbit, and I was more than happy - I was still able to view Netflix or Vudu HDX while I was downloading on two PCs simultaniously without a hit in speed.
People just don't really seem to understand - faster connections on your end doesn't mean you have that connection to every single server in the world.
Also, Charter doesn't block any ports that I know of. Open up a DMZ on your router.
Now, I just moved, and went from Charter to Time Warner in the new area. Now, you might think "OMG, Time Warner is number 7, they must be horrible" but notice that if you actually look at the speeds on the chart in the article, Fios, which is number 2, is 2.19Mbps, Time Warner is 2.12. That really is not that big of a difference. Even Uverse, at 1.94, that is only a 200k difference, which is roughly a 10% difference.
Now, you start getting below UVerse, and the speeds get horrible. However, I think CentruyLink and Windstream tend to be providers for apartment complexes and such, so you are probably on a shared connection. With the DSL speeds, that is probably average, and I am willing to bet that many of those people have the $15-$20 a month 768kbps package.
This chart is pretty much useless. It doesn't show the potential that an end user can get, it just shows what the average speed of a Netflix stream on that connection is. I am willing to bet that many people have the slowest broadband speeds their ISP offers. 6Mbps DSL is plenty fast enough for a Netflix HD stream. Before I got Charter, I streamed over 6Mbps DSL. Worked perfectly.
I don't see many of the issues you are complaining about. I am not saying they don't exist, I've just never seen them. I have seen a couple of obscure codecs that VLC doesn't work, but they play just fine in Media Player with KLite installed. I've never seen the point of network streaming with VLC - I either share the folder or use Windows Media Center to share the folders, and pull up the files on my laptop or XBox. Seems to be much less trouble. Menu support for DVDs does suck, but I normally have VLC set to skip menus anyways.
Things I would like to see:
1) What is up with VLC wanting to rebuild the font cache? I haven't installed new fonts. Stop asking to rebuild the font cache every 10 or 20th start.
2) If the codec isn't bundled in with VLC, it should be able to read the codec off of Windows. This will stop me from having to resort to Media Player for the couple of obscure videos that VLC doesn't support (or having to convert the video)
3) I want to be able to setup some defaults on videos. If the audio stream has 5.1 channels, I want it to default to that, not to 2.0 channels. I understand that most people do not have 5.1 hooked up to their PCs, but I would like the option to have that set as a default.
4) Be able to setup defaults for certain types of videos based on resolution, framerate, aspect ratio, etc. For example, there are several software packages out there (mainly converters) that have the option to detect black bars (ie 4x3 letterboxed stuff). I would love an option to detect that in a video and auto-crop to 16x9. If the framerate is say 30 or 60fps, I would like to have an option to deinterlace by default.
5) Better support for 3D material. Mainly my issue is that I have 3D software that renders all files as full-SBS. I have looked and looked for options in the software to render HalfSBS, but I just can't find the option. The problem in VLC is that it scales the video on my 3DTV, to 1920x1080, meaning that my videos get pillarboxed and stretched when I switch the TV to SBS mode. i don't have this issue with HalfSBS material that I rip from Youtube and such. Basically, I want the option where, if the video is 3840x1080, it would scale it to 1920x1080. Right now, the only option I seem to have is to use Total Media Center and have it send a native 3D image to the TV instead of SBS. This works, but ITMC seems to be really bad about dropping frames, even on an 8 core system and high end video card.
6) Support for DVD and Blu-Ray disc structures. Like, I think they took this feature out of PowerDVD, but you used to be able to tell it to play disc structures on the harddrive. I author a lot of the materail I shoot to Blu-Ray, and would like to make sure it works before I write it to disc. Right now, I have to spend about an hour writing it to a BD-RW to see that it works right.
if any of these features are already in VLC, someone please tell me how to use them!